New pro-gun senator declares support for gay marriage in maiden speech

The Liberal Democrat’s David Leyonhjelm says same-sex couples should be free to wed but celebrants and wedding venues should also be free to discriminate.

THE sole senator from a party it’s thought many people voted for mistakenly thinking they were the Liberals, has used his first speech to reiterate his opposition to the government’s policy against gay marriage.

David Leyonhjelm (pictured above), a NSW Senator for the Liberal Democrat party, took his seat among the so called ‘micro parties’ in the new Senate this week.

Yesterday, in his maiden speech, Leyonhjelm said governments should rarely interfere in personal issues.

“Liberty is eroded when our cherished right to vote is turned into an obligation and becomes a crime when we don’t do it,” he said.

“It is eroded when we are unable to marry the person of our choice, whatever their gender.

“Liberty is eroded when we are prohibited from doing something that causes harm to nobody else, irrespective of whether we personally approve or would do it ourselves,” he added.

“It is not legitimate for government to involve itself in things that an individual voluntarily does to him or herself, or that people choose to do to each other by mutual consent, when nobody else is harmed.”

The party’s website dismisses traditional arguments for maintaining marriage between a man and a woman, saying it was chiefly a tool to expand land assets an, “anthropologists theorise that most primitive marriages were polygamous and had little to do with love, monogamy or religion.”

The Liberal Democrats say they would support amendments to relevant legislation “so that marriage between two individuals had the same consequences irrespective of whether they were of the same or different gender.”

However, the party also states that providers of marriage services “should be free to discriminate in accordance with their own views of marriage.”

Leyonhjelm has also previously stated that the general public should be allowed to carry weapons if it means curbing gun crime in western Sydney.

Leyonhjelm said the Liberal Democratic Party differed from traditional parties because while the left wanted the government to control the economy but not the personal lives of its citizens and the right wanted to control its citizens’ personal lives but not the economy, his party supported “liberty across the board”.

“I have long thought that leaving people alone is the most reasonable position to take,” he said.

The Liberal Democrat’s beliefs are rooted solidly in libertarianism with the party saying its stands for “greater freedom, smaller government and personal responsibility”.

In practice, this would mean lowering taxes, loosening rules on gun ownership, legalising euthanasia, decriminalising cannabis use, ending foreign aid, the privatisation of all government owned bodies— including the ABC, SBS and Australia Post— and the full deregulation of the higher education sector.